Tag Archives: Multifunctional

The site, Piazza Bocca della Verita (Forum Boarium) is Rome’s oldest and first public space, predating even the Forum Romanum. Adjacent to the Palentine Hill and alongside the Tiber River, it was a fundamental place of exchange, serving as a market. It contains the city’s oldest preserved temple, dedicated to Hercules Victor and a second republican era temple dedicated to the god Portunus, protector of the nearby port. The first fortification wall of the city, the Servian Wall, included the site within its boundary.
The sectional lessons ofan initial, spatial exercise provided a set of possibilities for challenging the problematic circumstances of the particular site. Invented transformations of the analyzed urban space, Trastevere/St. Peter’s spatial sequence, became tools, like swiss army knives that can be unfolded and configured to resolve a particular circumstance while extending the palimpsest of the city. Three primary programmatic elements were given- a Think Tank (the Tiber Institute), a Museum of the Cloaca Maxima, and a Chamber Music Performance Hall. They were to be conjoined and address individually as well as collectively the ongoing issues of contextual integration through exhibition, performance, assembly, and housing. Collectively, the project is intended to act as a mirror to the cumulative essence of the city’s larger context.

Once the sole purview of the profession of civil engineering, infrastructure- which includes the management of water, waste, food, transport, and energy- is taking on extreme relevance for landscape planning and design practices in the context of changing, decentralizing structures of urban-regional economies. Food production and energy networks can no longer be engineered without considering the cascade of waste streams in the cycling of raw material inputs…Put simply, the urban-regional landscape should be conceived as infrastructure.

All forms of waste are eventually consumed, used, and recycled in a chain of matter and energy flow. But humans have persistently mismanaged their waste, creating new types at an increasing pace and in excessive quantities without establishing recovery mechanisms that enable their flow and circulation back into the cultural / natural systems…[waste] is a link in the continuous flow of matter and energy.

Engineering systems are designed from the inside outward, that is, from components into a functioning whole. Behavior of a system is a consequence of interaction of its parts, parts that themselves must be understood and interconnected.